“Who are you to tell me who I really am?” she asked with a kick of temper, clenching her hands into fists below the table, where he could not see. She had longed for him to know her, to see her, for years—but he never had. She shook away the old wants, the old needs, even as they seemed to sear through her, leaving deep marks behind. “When you are the person who knows me least of all?”
“I know you,” he said, with that terrifying ring of finality, of certainty, that she could sense meant things to him that she was better off not knowing. “I know you in ways no one else could.”
“If that was ever true, it has not been true for a long time,” she replied, choosing her words carefully. Trying to ignore the part of her that still desperately wanted him to know her the way he claimed he did, the part of her that wished so deeply that somehow, some way, he could.
She shook her head, trying to ward off her own turmoil and his accusatory glare.
“Let me guess,” he said icily. He did not move, and yet she could feel the way his gaze, his attention and temper focused on her, narrowing in on them both, trapping them in the grip of this roiling tension between them. “No doubt you have spent the past three years coming up with the perfect, bloodless fantasy to use as a comparison to our relationship. No doubt your supernaturally forgiving lover aids you in this. Anything to avoid looking at yourself with any form of honest appraisal, is that it?”
Her temper flared. And for once she could think of no particular reason to keep it locked up. She told herself she had nothing to lose—it was all already lost. This was simply a pointless dance around the bonfire of what they had been. An opportunity to watch it all burn away into ash.
So why should she bite her tongue?
“I do not think marriage should be a monarchy, with you installed as king by divine right while I am expected to play the role of grateful, subservient subject,” she told him, the words three years in the making. For a brief moment she felt just as she sounded. Calm. Deadly. “It cannot even be called a marriage. It is an exercise in steamrolling, and I am tired of feeling flattened by you.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. His expression was frozen, arrested. She was aware of the slight breeze against her bare skin, the dance of the candles in their crystal holders. She was not holding her breath, not quite. She felt as if she watched the scene from on high.
She had never dared say such things to Leo before. How could she? Their relationship had been entirely based on his acknowledged superiority. What room had there been for her to call his actions or his assumptions into question?
And she knew that her own appalling behavior had only made everything worse. Who would have listened to an out-of-control maniac who smashed things? Who would take the emotional mess seriously? Certainly not Leo.
And not even herself, Bethany acknowledged with no little pain. That had come later.
“You say the most extraordinary things,” he said coldly.
Because Leo did not explode. Leo did not rage, yell or allow things to become messy. Leo did not, could not, feel.
“I understand that this is all a foreign concept to someone who has issued orders to his minions from his cradle,” she said, her voice stiff from her own revelations, and only partially a response to his chilly glare, no matter how it pierced her. “Who has priceless paintings on his walls of his own family members. Who lives in a castle.”
“You quite mistake me,” he bit out. “I am astonished that you would have any thoughts at all on what might make for a good marriage. Real relationships are not conducted according to your every melodramatic whim and tantrum, Bethany.”
“That’s taking the concept of the pot calling the kettle black to the level of farce,” she replied, blinking away the avalanche of emotion that threatened to drag her under. There was no room for that here, now. And she could not be certain what lurked just on the other side.
His mouth flattened with displeasure, but she did not back down. Because, no matter what he believed, it was true.
He had left her to die of loneliness, and she nearly had.
“I am not the one who issued ultimatums and then, when they were not met, threw temper tantrums,” he said then. His mouth twisted; his dark eyes were condemning. “I am not the one who stubbornly refused contact for years in an extended fit of pique.”
“Stop it!” she hissed, but he gave no sign of hearing her. She had the sense that he had been waiting to say these things as long as she had. She could see the way he held himself, all that power and ferocity tightly leashed and controlled, even now.
“I am also not the one who issued a demand for a divorce instead of the polite greeting one might give a stranger on the street.” His eyes seemed to glow with his cold, consuming fury. He was, she realized, more angry than she had imagined. More angry than she had ever seen him. Was it sick that she wanted that to mean something? “And having done all of those things, seemingly without shame, I am not the one to sit here now and lecture on about successful marriages.”